Modernist whimsy: entertaining difficulty in the work of Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and Stevie Smith

我的论文感兴趣的是，当我们以批评话语中的异想天开为中心，考察它所依附的作家和诗歌形式时，会发生什么。这是对在文学批评语境中发出的尴尬的音符的回应：在现代主义时期，它经常被用作一种不屑一顾的词，描述一种过于幻想的诗意或文学手法。我的研究源于威尔·梅的重要观察，即异想天开也是评论家们，尤其是女性诗人可以使用的一个“权宜之计”类别。我把他的论点看作是对现代主义女性诗歌嬉戏的一种邀请，并质问这种嬉戏是如何被贬低的。因此，我的论文既着眼于文本中的异想天开的作品，也着眼于它如何塑造我们对文本的批判性理解，作为对异想天开的美学和批评价值的女性主义重构的一部分。通过对格特鲁德·斯坦、玛丽安·摩尔和史蒂维·史密斯诗歌的分析，我的观点有两点：第一，作为一个性别美学范畴，异想天开破坏了一些诗人而不是其他诗人的接受；第二，对使异想天开成为一种令人担忧的模式的结构的认识，在斯坦、摩尔和史密斯的作品中占据了突出地位，他们将这些紧张关系组织成一种复杂的自我时尚形式。20世纪的希姆西作为一个与困难形成对比的范畴出现，这是高度现代主义的标志，其遗产继续塑造着艺术概念和专业化的文学批评。正如伦纳德·迪佩文所写的那样，困难已经成为封圣的必要条件。异想天开，就像“失败的”艺术一样，似乎是监督严肃和一次性之间区别的另一种手段。然而，这篇论文的论点是，异想天开与细致入微的批判性相联系，给了这样的文本和作家逃避美学和批判性惯例的许可证。梅在1892年对艾米莉·狄金森诗歌的评论中写道，“异想天开的”代表着一个普通读者找不到的术语，一个他无法破译的诗学。在这种表述中，异想天开取代了困难，这是他对一首他认为具有挑战性的诗的性别反应的一部分。我的论点集中在奇思妙想在这里提出的挑战，认为奇思妙想是它自己的复杂类别，而不仅仅是一种不屑一顾的替代品。我从黛博拉·鲍曼(Deborah Bowman)在她的论文《Readymade》中对异想天开的定义出发，这篇论文提出了令人费解的要求：用所有可能的语气让你想知道：想象一下认真对待它。她的定义与迪佩文对难度的体验性强调相似，后者强调的是难度的体验性，他将难度描述为“文本和读者之间的互动”。她把异想天开作为一种双重邀请，来拒绝和娱乐它--换句话说，与其说这是一种物品的性质，不如说是一种对事物的恳求。因此，难度和异想天开不是描述对象的审美属性，而是描述与对象的关系，以及由此产生的一系列影响。这种理解提供了我将异想天开作为一个批判性概念进行讯问的条件，并将其用作阅读斯坦、摩尔和史密斯的工具，建立在该范畴存在的有限学术基础上。梅在单独的文章中讨论了异想天开在《遏制女性在社会中的智力角色》中的作用(参考了多萝西·帕克、摩尔和西尔维娅·普拉斯)，并将其用作伦理借口(参考埃兹拉·庞德)，我的博士学位将把这些视角结合在一起，证明异想天开的风险从根本上是性别因素。

My thesis is interested in what happens when we centre whimsy in critical discourse and examine the writers and poetical forms it attaches to. This is in response to the note of embarrassment that whimsy has sounded in a literary-critical context: in the modernist period, it is often used as a dismissal, describing a poetic mood or literary device that is overly fanciful. My research proceeds from Will May's crucial observation that whimsy has also been an 'expedient' category for critics to use, particularly of women poets. I take his arguments as an invitation to centre the playfulness of modernist women's poetry and interrogate the ways in which this playfulness has been disparaged. My thesis thus looks both at the wayswhimsy works within texts and the ways it has moulded our critical understandings of texts as part of a feminist reframing of whimsy's aesthetic and critical value. Through analysis of the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore and Stevie Smith, my contention is twofold: first, that as a gendered aesthetic category, whimsy works unevenly to sabotage the reception of some poets and not others; and second, that an awareness of the structures that make whimsy a fraught mode figures prominently in the work of Stein, Moore and Smith, who organise these tensions into a complex form of self-fashioning.Whimsy in the twentieth century arises as a category in contrast to difficulty, that hallmark of high modernism whose legacy continues to shape conceptions of art and professionalised literary criticism. As Leonard Diepeveen writes, difficulty has 'become the necessary condition for canonization'. Whimsy, as 'failed' art, might seem to be another means of policing this distinction between the serious and the throwaway. The contention of this thesis, however, is that the association of whimsy with critical in scrutability has given such texts and writers the licence to evade aesthetic and critical conventions. May writes in a gloss on an 1892 review of Emily Dickinson's poetry that '"whimsical" stands in for a term themale reader cannot find for a poetics he cannot decipher'. In this formulation, whimsy replaces difficulty as part of a gendered reaction to a poem he finds challenging. My argument centres on the challenge whimsy here inscribes, considering whimsy as its own complex category, and not just a dismissive substitute. I proceed from the 'working definition' of whimsy that Deborah Bowman offers in her paper on the readymades, which drives towards its puzzling demands: 'something which makes you wonder, with allpossible tonalities: Imagine taking that seriously.' Staging whimsy as a double-minded invitation to dismiss something and to entertain it - in other words, less a quality of an object than it is an entreaty to do something with it - her definition parallels Diepeveen's emphasis on the experiential quality of difficulty, which he describes as an 'interaction between text and reader'. Rather than describing the aesthetic properties of an object, difficulty and whimsy therefore describe a relationship with an object, and the set of affectsthis entails.This understanding provides the terms of my interrogation of whimsy as a critical concept, and my use of it as a tool to read Stein, Moore and Smith, building on the limited scholarship that exists on the category. Where May, in separate essays, has addressed the question of whimsy's role in 'contain[ing] the intellectual role of women in society' (with reference to Dorothy Parker, Moore, and Sylvia Plath) and its use as ethical excuse (with reference to Ezra Pound), my PhD will bring these perspectives together to demonstrate that the risks of whimsy are fundamentally gendered.